


a cry for help

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Grimdark, Not Happy, breakup i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1455976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I have had the opportunity to gaze directly into her personal abyss, and all I have seen is pain and anger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this has not been a good week  
> i guess i kind of indirectly promised something lighter and happier but i'm absolutely not feeling that right now  
> sorry for this gross depressing mental vomit

I have had the opportunity to gaze directly into her personal abyss, and all I have seen is pain and anger.

Despite what I may have told others previously, nothing is “All Right,” and has not been for a very, very long time.  
She hurts. She suffers. She lashes out. She spits acid and she swears and tears carve canyons in her cheeks. I am her favorite target. I am her only target. Her only release. My mistakes are damning evidence against me. My emotions are proof of my guilt. I am powerless to help, thus I cannot be bothered to. I am confused and ask for clarification before leaping to erroneous conclusions, and thus I have not been listening. I am always at fault for something. As if I am the only source of misery in her life.  
Her skin is gray, her eyes blaze black smoke, and she speaks in no language I can understand. This is not who I came to love.  
When she calms, sometimes in hours, sometimes in days, she is silent, subdued, and vulnerable. If I am lucky, I receive an apology. Mostly I am expected to be content with the illusion that she does not hate me for now.

I used to be able to do just that. Now I am not so sure.

When she hurts, she attacks. Sometimes she hurts because I hurt her. I never mean to. I apologize as soon as I recognize what I have done. But only rarely does that prevent the storm. I am terrified when she is angry at me. Fear chokes me when the black tendrils curl lovingly around her ankles and when the tongues of the ancients warp her words into something monstrous. I say things I should not, and that further drives her away. I hold my tongue, and she assumes I do not care enough to respond to her. I cry, and she mocks me. I leave, and she becomes incensed.  
After much trial and error, I still do not know what to do when the grimdarkness resumes control. She says I do not try to draw her out of it, when I am too paralyzed by fear of the consequences of doing something incorrectly to do anything at all. “At least try,” she huffs, but if I do, and it is not right, the words of the broodfester tongues wrap themselves around my wrists, my legs, my throat, and I see black before they release me.

“Don’t touch me,” she snarls when I approach, when I am at a loss of what to do, when it is clear my trembling words are proving ineffective.  
Her most common responses to anything I say are “Why.” “It doesn’t matter.” “You don’t care.” “You don’t listen.” “You don’t try.” “You’re not sorry.”  
When they are comprehensible, her words are scathing and cut through my flesh with no resistance.   
It is not as if I do not love her. I do. But I cannot bring myself to love this monster, this demon, that fights its way out of her mind and into her mouth more and more frequently with each passing day. It is still her, but it is a part of her I cannot cope with, cannot accept.

I know it is a product of her past, of a combination of her own mistakes and things that were beyond her control. I know she does not will it to appear. 

I want to believe she does not mean the things she says about me. I want to believe that it is only the ghosts of her past returning to haunt her and driving her insane with their hollow whispers. I want to believe that this is only a phase, that she is very stressed and when that happens the monster emerges more easily, that there is a good reason she rarely apologizes or says without being prompted that she did not mean the words that rip a hole through me every time they leave her lips.

But I am becoming less willing to believe.

It was pure and simple naivety that brought us to this situation to begin with.

Maybe at one point we were happy. Maybe things will change between us if we stay.

Maybe I am a wishful thinker.

I loved you.

Maybe I still do.

But I cannot love the other side of you. The other side that may even be your true self, given how often it emerges.

I can no longer forgive and forget. 

Perhaps it is my fault. Perhaps I cannot care enough about you to satisfy your needs. Perhaps I don’t listen to you. Perhaps you’re right about me being self-centered and useless.

But if that were the case, you would not want me anyway, and you would be glad to see me gone.

Goodbye, Rose.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh shit another chapter how unexpected  
> eh i don't know how to feel about this one maybe this whole thing is better off without  
> oh well

I follow the stench of alcohol and sickness to find her slumped against the wall, arms limp on the ground and eyes screwed shut. An empty glass and nearly empty bottle lay in pieces, smashed against the wall in front of her. Her clothes are stained with substances I do not want to think about, and more trickles out of her parted lips.

Walk away, my instinct demands. I am rooted to the spot. Her red and puffy eyes painfully wrench open, and purple irises flick to where I am standing in her peripheral vision.  
I am only able to meet her gaze for a moment before I force myself to look somewhere else. Leave, my instinct insists. I should listen. I do not move.

Her mouth opens slightly more, allowing some more fluid to leak out. She shakily raises a hand and wipes it on the back of it before dropping it back to the floor with a dead thump. I know she has not yet stopped staring at me, though I am pretending to be very invested in the depth of the hallway before us.  
She is struggling to speak. I look to her face and look away just as quickly, cursing myself instantly. Not again. Not again, not again.

“Kanaya,” she groans, and there’s a harshness to her a voice, a creaking slowness, that I’ve never heard before. It reminds me of rusty gears grinding together, not at all her usual glib and smooth cadence.

I’m doing it again. Damn it. Don’t think, about anything, least of all her.

My eyes betray me and slip again to her face before I right myself and lower my gaze to the floor directly in front of me. She has begun to cry, and it appears she has been doing that rather frequently. Since I left.  
Since she drove me away, I correct myself, but even the thought causes me to grind my teeth together in barely concealed agitation. Don’t.

“Kanaya,” she says again, her voice curving upward in pitch so it sounds like a whimper by the end. The pathetic sound takes a cold and firm grip on my heart. Oh god, no. Don’t pity her. Don’t even begin to pity her. She does not deserve it. She has proven so.

“I haven’t,” she says slowly, agonizingly slowly, and I can tell that she is trying her best not to slur her words despite her obvious impairment. “I haven’t…gone…gridma—grimdark…since…”  
Since I left, I finish her sentence silently. Tears cascade down her cheeks, and her shoulders heave. 

“Because you have been drinking,” I say out loud, accidentally in the coldest voice I have ever managed to muster.

Now she is emitting tiny, strangled sobs. My heart twists, and my nails dig into my palms. It’s happening. I want it to stop.

“Oh god…Kanaya…” she whimpers, leaning forward and placing her head in her hands. “I can’t…I’m so…”

Whatever other words she was about to speak are immediately drowned out by loud, wailing sobs. I am torn. Instinct howls at me to run, to turn, flee, do not under any circumstances look back. Yet the tiniest voice in the back of my mind begs me to look at this pitiful alien, crumpled on herself, nearly unable to breathe because of her crying. The crying I caused. The crying that is directly my fault.

I made my choice. I need to stick with it.

Which means turning my back on the one living soul in the entire universe who has no one else to come to, no one else who understands like I do. Did.

She made her choice as well.

Was it really hers? Did she have any control?

She almost never apologized.

Do I require an apology? Maybe I am just as vain as she thinks I am if I am thinking of my own feelings over hers.

Which is ingrained in my very nature. Trolls are selfish. Trolls are violent. Trolls are survivors at the expense of others.

Is that a good thing? The troll race is no more. What is the point in sticking to traditions, even instincts, that are both harmful to others and that I know can be defied?

We have both made mistakes, I finally concede to myself. But Rose is clearly incapable of fixing them and moving on, whatever that entails. She is in dire need of assistance. And the only one who can help, probably the only one she will allow to help, is me.

With some bitterness I remember Vriska and the pain and heartbreak she caused me. I promised myself I would never give in again. Rose was different, I thought. Rose would never behave so carelessly, with no regard to anyone else.

I should know better by now. My fate is sealed. I will always be the one to give everything and eventually get nothing in return. Such is the life of a troll, a young jadeblood rainbow drinker whose race is gone, whose only friends are dead or in danger of dying soon. 

I have not yet accepted my destiny, but I think I am nearing that point.

I release the grip I had on my own wrist. My nails have left small but very dark green crescents in my skin.

Rose stares up at me, eyes still wet. I silently sink my teeth into the inside of my lip as I take one small, deliberate step toward her, then crouch on the ground beside her.  
Her eyes shimmer and more tears fall. Anxiety rolls over me as I extend one arm toward her cheek, expecting the worst as I hold my fingers to her hot skin.  
She leans into my hand and falls toward me. I catch her as she collapses, clutching her to me as her sobs begin anew. Now there are words amongst the tortured crying. I am able to catch “I’m sorry,” repeatedly. I say nothing.

Eventually the noise subsides and she is left, battered and weakened, huddled in my arms.

“You must stop drinking,” I say in an authoritative tone.  
“I know,” is her response, quiet and breaking. “I do it because it keeps away the horrorterrors.”  
“The soporific changes you as much as the horrorterrors do.”  
“I know. I don’t know what to do. I thought it was…a lesser evil. I thought you would prefer me being intoxicated and obnoxious over possessed and livid.”

She stumbles over some of the multisyllabic words, but the fact that she is even using them is a sign of her sobering. 

She shakes her head and buries her face in me, inhaling deeply, clinging to me with every ounce of strength she bears.  
“I’ve just been…so stressed…and I get…kind of insane as it builds…and I take it out on you and I know that’s not fair and god, Kanaya, I’m so, so sorry. I get scared when I don’t know what to do. I feel alone. And that’s when I…”

Her voice dies. Silence rings in my ears.

“You need help,” I say simply.  
“I know.”

“I will…” I trail off and swallow hard. This is a commitment now. A promise. There is no going back.  
“I will do what I can to help. But I fear I am not enough.”

“I don’t think you are either. But…we can manage together anyway,” she says with the smallest glimmer of hope.

I let the unasked question hang in the air. I remember everything, every conversation we had before our first meeting, the first time we saw each other in person, the first time I touched her and fire seared where our skin made contact, the first time I realized how her small, knowing smile and lavender eyes made my heart pound with the force of a meteor, the first time our lips touched and how it set off a flare of light and heat in my chest and sent tremors throughout my entire body that I could recall instantly for weeks with merely a thought.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am naïve. Maybe I am falling into the exact same trap again.

But I have accepted my fate. 

Everyone deserves a second chance.

“I believe we can,” I agree.


End file.
